Boldt 03 - No Witnesses (34 page)

A cold, penetrating chill started at the back of her scalp. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Never a word.”

She grabbed on to his shirt, slid off the couch, and pulled him to the floor with her. “Daffy!” he protested, but she quieted him with a “Shh!” and led him crawling across the floor and into the windowless bathroom. She pushed the door shut, locked it, and turned on a pale night-light that colored the white walls cream. Her clothes were damp from the exhausting climb up the trail.

“What are you doing?” he asked tenderly, grinning, amused with her, fingering a lock of her hair that hung in her eyes.

She glanced at him hotly, afraid, fumbled through her small purse, and pulled up the antenna on the cellular phone. She questioned, “How did he know it was you on the phone, Owen?” She keyed in the phone number too hastily and made a mistake, forcing her to cancel several digits and reenter them. Angrily she asked, “
How did he know?
”

Adler’s mouth slacked open.

“Did you come by the tunnel?” she asked. Again, he failed to answer.

Adler had purchased two water-view estates on Loyal and had connected them into one. The former landowner, a product of the paranoia of the early sixties, had installed a bomb shelter in his backyard, at great expense, with an underground tunnel connecting it to the main house. Owen now used the bomb shelter as a wine cellar, and had also connected the guest house to it via a tunnel so that guests could share access to the fine wines and, more important, avoid the miserable rains when going back and forth between the two houses. It was a gimmick, and used rarely, because Owen Adler rarely entertained overnight guests with his busy schedule. Still he loved showing off both the tunnel and his extensive wine collection, and he used the tunnel whenever possible—even in nice weather. “Did you—”

“Yes, the tunnel,” he managed to say.

Boldt was not home. She apologized to Liz for calling late, hung up, and called Boldt’s pager number, keying in her cellular phone number when the recording asked for it. For two minutes she and Owen Adler sat shoulder to shoulder in an awkward silence on the bathroom’s tile floor.

Her cellular phone chirped, and she answered it instantly. “It’s me,” she told Boldt. “I’m at Owen’s. He was here, Lou—Caulfield—he may
still
be here.”

“What?” Adler exclaimed.

“Right!” she said into the phone. “We’re in the guest house. We’ll wait.”

“Corky!” Adler said, thinking of his daughter. He came to his feet, but Daphne caught hold of his shirt.

She disconnected the call. Still holding him back, she told her lover, “I’ll go.”

Adler’s face contorted. “Here?”

She spoke rapidly. “He
knew
it was you on the phone, Owen. You said so yourself.” She waited briefly for this to register, but Adler was a mass of confusion. She said impatiently, “He knew because he was
looking
—he was
watching
you.”

Adler sprang for the door, but Daphne blocked him with a straight arm and ordered him to lock the doors behind her. “It’s
you
he wants. I’m going for Corky.”

“To hell with that,” he said, shoving her aside abruptly. He threw open the door and ran for the tunnel.

Daphne followed, but failed to catch him. The concrete tunnel consisted of two long subterranean passages that met outside the wine cellar’s vaultlike steel door. The passage to the main house was noticeably older, its lights more widely spaced and therefore darker.

When she did catch up to him, he was in Corky’s room, his arms wrapped around his eleven-year-old, who was caught halfway between waking and dreaming.

Corky wrestled loose of her father’s constraints, jumped out of bed, and assaulted Daphne, leaping into her arms, “Daffy!” she exclaimed, using Boldt’s nickname for her that followed her everywhere.

Carrying the heavy child, who hung from her neck awkwardly, Daphne edged to the windows and pulled the drapes. Seeing this, Adler helped her, and the darkened room became darker still.

“What now?” he asked her, helping Corky off her.

“You stay
right here
,” Daphne said defiantly. “I’ll get the lights and lock up.”

This time Adler nodded.

“Are you cooking breakfast?” Corky asked her. This was the euphemism they used when Daphne spent the night.

“No, not tonight,” Daphne answered. She met eyes with Owen. His eyes were filled with tears.

Boldt understood immediately the difficulty he faced. If he descended on Adler’s estate with ten patrol cars and the entire late-shift ID unit, and if the estate were being watched, the involvement of the police would be rather obvious. On the other hand, if the Tin Man were somewhere on the property and Boldt passed up an opportunity to contain him and apprehend him, then he was throwing away innocent lives.

He checked his watch: His squad’s shift had ended at midnight, forty-five minutes ago.

He reached LaMoia at home, and ten minutes later, Bobbie Gaynes at her apartment. He tried Danielson’s apartment, failed to reach the man, and had the dispatcher page the detective, hoping for a call back on the cellular. He called in five patrol cars, each with two uniforms, and deployed them roughly around the perimeter of Adler’s estate—not an easy task given the terrain and layout of the Loyal area. One officer from each team was to stay with the car, the other to make ready to work his or her way toward the main house, if requested.

He roused Shoswitz and prosecuting attorney Michael Striker and informed them of the developments. It was during his conversation with Shoswitz that he learned that two different ATMs had been hit that night and yet another three thousand dollars withdrawn.

Boldt arrived at Adler’s nine-thousand-square-foot home ahead of either of his detectives. He pulled Daphne aside and the two talked over Boldt’s plan for several minutes. “It’s pretty low-profile at the moment,” Boldt explained. “In case things change and we need it, Shoswitz is arranging for KOMO’s traffic chopper for air surveillance.” The news radio chopper—its services often lent to SPD—would also carry a SWAT sharpshooter, but Boldt left that part out. Daphne abhorred the entire approach of SWAT—shoot first, talk later.

He was shown to Adler’s sumptuous office, which was hidden behind a moving bookshelf. The decor reminded Boldt of an English manor home. The office window faced out to the water and the precipitous terrain leading down to Daphne’s unseen car parked far below in Golden Gardens Park. “The only point of view into this office,” Boldt observed, “would be from the lawn or one of those trees.”

They looked out at the broken teeth of the jagged horizon. In private, Daphne told Boldt about her encounter with Mackensie in those very woods, and Boldt weighed what to do about it. As Gaynes and LaMoia arrived separately, but nearly at the same moment, Boldt was on the phone to Fowler. The security man dodged any direct answer about the estate’s surveillance and said he would look into it. Boldt, furious, advised that he look into it quickly. “We’re going into those woods with our safeties off,” Boldt explained. “You had better get your people out of there.”

By the time a nervous and perspiring Boldt had quickly briefed his two detectives, Kenny Fowler called back. “There’s no one currently deployed,” Fowler told him. “But we have a slight problem on this end—might be technical. Might not be. We can’t seem to raise Mackensie.”

With Daphne’s help, they searched the house thoroughly, checking every possible hiding place, and then locked it up tightly and armed the security system. Outside, LaMoia took the high ground, assigned to check the gardens and shrubs and landscape. The three of them used secured police-frequency radios that connected them to one another and with the perimeter patrol personnel, who were put on an armed-and-dangerous alert. Boldt and Bobbie Gaynes took the hillside, while Daphne patrolled the home’s interior.

They started down the steep hillside trail together, but quickly separated, because it became obvious that the only trees offering a view of Adler’s office were perched near the very top of the incline. Boldt went left, Gaynes right.

He checked behind him frequently, watching for the beam of her flashlight as it swept the trees and ground cover. From training, he mentally divided the area into a number of grids and approached his search as he would a homicide crime scene. Methodically, he moved from grid to grid, patiently alert for some sign of recent activity.

He found just such a sign about twenty yards into the thicket—deep enough that when he turned, he could no longer see the light from the efforts of Bobbie Gaynes. The stems of a large plant were crushed, and a few feet farther along he noticed a skid mark where a boot or shoe had recently kicked a rut into the fallen brown pine needles. Beyond this, he encountered yet another swath of broken twigs through a thicket. It smelled moldy deep in the woods; it smelled of decomposition and too much moisture and not enough sunlight. Boldt used the radio to softly announce that he had picked up signs to follow. He advised Gaynes to return to the main trail and descend slowly, alert for indications of where the man may have departed from it. LaMoia was to stand guard at the top of the trail in case they flushed the suspect.

Boldt moved slowly now, painfully aware of the easy target he offered by carrying a lit flashlight. Within a few yards his trail ended at the trunk of an extremely climbable tree. The bark was scarred pale where a clambering shoe had scraped it clean. Boldt shined the light up the tightly spaced branches. Considering himself too big and too clumsy for such acrobatics, Boldt nonetheless snapped his weapon in tightly, stuffed the light into his coat pocket so that it aimed up, illuminating his ascent route, and began to climb.

He did not have to climb far. Fifteen feet up, he got his first look at the house. He could see LaMoia pacing impatiently at the top of the trail steps near the guest house. He climbed up higher and discovered a large, heavy branch that ran nearly level and probably offered a fairly comfortable perch. The flashlight revealed that here the dark tree bark was excessively shredded yellow. Someone had spent some time here. He did not climb up onto the branch, for he wanted to leave it for ID, who were waiting for a call while parked only a few blocks away. But there seemed to him little question as to the quality of the unobstructed view this offered of Adler’s home office.

He aimed the light back down to the ground, with a little voice calling to him never to look down, and experienced a brief sensation of vertigo. But it was as he was planning his descent through the branches that his eye caught the flash of something bright. Suddenly his planned route meant nothing to him. He descended out of the tree as effortlessly as would a chimpanzee.

From above they had looked like yellow pine needles, and yet unnatural and misplaced. Boldt counted three of them—not pine needles at all. Each chewed to a pulp on both ends—discarded as the Tin Man had sat patiently up in this tree biding his time, waiting to place his call. Toothpicks. Three of them. Freshly chewed—damp to the touch at one end, dry on the other.

The radio spit static and the urgent voice of Bobbie Gaynes said, “Sergeant, I need you down here. I’m about thirty yards lower than where we split up. I’m waving my light.”

Boldt covered his own flashlight and saw the beam from hers reflected in limbs of the trees. “I’ve got you.” He took note of his surroundings so he could find this same spot again. He contacted Bernie Lofgrin’s ID crew and told them to come onto the property and to wait with LaMoia at the top of the trail. LaMoia copied.

Boldt contacted Daphne and asked her to relay to prosecuting attorney Michael Striker that they needed an immediate access to the calling logs of all the area cellular phone companies. If it had been Caulfield in that tree, and if he had made the phone call from up there, then it had to be from a cellular phone. If Caulfield had a cell phone, then he had an account; if he had an account, he had a mailing address. Striker was to contact Boldt the moment he located a record of any such call.

The park trail was rough going at a run. Boldt punched through a railroad tie, crashed, and recovered himself, but not without winning some bruises to show for it.

Gaynes was fifteen yards off the trail into the woods, in an area that seemed to Boldt nearly directly beneath the observation tree. As Boldt approached, she asked, “Did you have dinner?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re lucky. I just left mine in a bush over there.”

Boldt did not think of Gaynes as having a tender stomach. He reached her. He could smell the metallic bite of fresh blood in the air well before he saw the body. She lowered her light onto Mackensie’s corpse. The branch that had been used to cave in his face was lying a few yards from the twisted wreck of a body, and Boldt thought that the man might have survived that blow had his hands not been cleaved from his arms at the wrist with something incredibly sharp. But there they lay—at the ends of his arms looking like a pair of deerskin gloves. Mac Mackensie, knocked unconscious by that branch, had bled to death, his face now the color of a bedsheet.

A few minutes later when LaMoia arrived, he said to Gaynes, “Come on, help me. I think we should give him a hand.”

At three in the morning, Boldt drove Daphne down to where she had parked her car in the picnic area.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

Daphne nodded.

“You’re just tired,” he tried. “It’s late.”

“I’m wide awake,” she answered. She could not think how to explain what she felt to another person; she barely understood it herself. As a psychologist, she wanted to be strong and able to quickly overcome such pain—to adapt. But as a woman, a human being, she ached not for Mac Mackensie, but selfishly, for herself. Then she thought that Lou Boldt, of all people, would understand. “Five minutes either way,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice giving her away.

Boldt pulled the car next to her Honda and left it running. “And it would have been you,” he said.

She nodded, and she felt the choking sensation in her throat, she felt the tears, and she hated herself for this reaction. She leaned forward and Boldt put his big hand on her back and rubbed her there, and it comforted her. “That was too damn close for me,” she said, sobbing now. “And it’s
me
I care about, not Mac Mackensie—can you believe that? And you know how he went out? He went out being a jerk. A real goddamn prick. And that’s the last thing he ever was—a jerk. A real jerk. Listen to me!”